ISSUES AND CONCERNS

We are into 2015. Old order changeth yielding place to the new. So, its WISHING ALL OUR READERS, PATRONS & WELL WISHERS A GREAT NEW YEAR. The year 2014 that went by had all the making of political block buster, with the newer political party AAP making its debut in forming government in Delhi. They came with a bang but left without even whimper in just 48 days. It was the stupidest political move by any party, especially an year old party. Narendra Modi is another phenomena, that came with a roar of an untamed lion. He has redrawn the political behaviour unseen or unheard earlier, whether it was his prostrated entry into the parliament complex or his independence day speech. They were class apart. Of course with him came his party’s unprecedented victory. After quarter century, it was again a single party government, although for record it is NDA. After 6 months, it is still not clear that the ‘Abki baar Modi Sarkar’ would deliver all its promises! But certainly there is a ne...

NEW DELHI: Attributing to a Delhi court, the print media carried a head line “Women making false rape allegation need to be punished”. This observation did not come a day too early. In fact there are ‘n’ number of instances where false complaints are lodged to settle personal score. These false cases not only cause completely avoidable humiliation and misery, it even lead to suicides by some sensitive persons who are completely innocents. Instances of false complaints are not only in rape or something similar, but also in dowry harassment cases, where there have been absolutely false cases filed by disgruntled wife against her husband just to cause agony and harassment to innocent husband. Then there are false cases slapped by police, either due to inept handling or by design and innocents suffer unaccounted jail terms without any rhyme or reason. Who will compensate the suffering and other pecuniary loss due to varieties of reasons? Suffering can be physical and mental. There ar...

NEHRU TO NARENDRA MODI WHERE HAS THE CONCILIATORY SPIRIT GONE! Come 14th Nov. 2014, it’s the Children’s Day in memory of chaachaa Nehru, as Jawaharlal Nehru was called, for his fondness of children. Of course, he is not alone, there are millions the world over who are fond of children. But then as a leader of an important country, in the global context, probably not many are known to be fond of kids. While every year, the schools across the country observed Children’s Day on 14th Nov., this time round, besides its solemn observance in schools, a completely avoidable controversy was introduced by the two major political players of the country. It was petty and appeared a bit sectarian too. Of course the controversy surrounding the celebration of the great man is not new. Surely, many Indians would remember the issue of Nehru Centenary Celebration Committee formation. Rajeev Gandhi, the then Prime Minister, riding on 400+ seats in the Loksabha had announced that Amitabh Bachchan wou...

The real silent killer-your own mind Prof. B. M. Hegde, hegdebm@gmail.com “Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway.” Kent M. Keith Our medical scare system tries to rope you into their basket by frightening you with words like silent killer high blood pressure, silent killer diabetes, etc. almost daily. The truth is otherwise. The silent killer is your own mind. Where is the mind? All over you, indeed! Mind is your own consciousness. Consciousness is fundamental and all else is derived from that was the opinion of one of the great brains in physics, Max Planck. Human body, is therefore, the extension of or the other name for the human mind. "Cogito ergo sum"- "I think, therefore, I am" was the right proclamation of Rene Descartes back in the eighteenth century, although he meant it for the opposite reasons to divide the human body into two parts-the thinking part (res Cogitans) and the other part (res Extensa ). That ...

Swachh Bharat & manual scavenging co-habit Lucknow: Over a year ago when Parliament passed a stringent anti-manual scavenging legislation, the husband-wife duo of Krishna and Ratna had hoped that government help would come and they would be able to shun the “horrific” job of cleaning night soil with their hands. But at a time when the Centre and the State governments are engaged in carrying out their own versions of “swachhata abhiyan”(cleanliness drives), every day at the strike of dawn the couple, with their little girl child, go from one home to another with a basket and a broom cleaning dry toilets in the bylanes right in the heart of the state capital. Krishna and Ratna are not the only ones engaged in manual scavenging. Dry toilets exist in around 1,000 homes in at least a dozen localities in the older part of the city. This is despite the fact that forcing people to clean dry toilets can attract stringent punishment, including up to five years of imprisonment. Thou...

Indian Roads unsafe! New Delhi: Three out of five people feel unsafe on Indian roads, says a survey conducted in 12 cities of the country including the four metros. During the survey, the general public expressed strong support for the Road Transport and Safety Bill, 2014 and expressed hope that roads will become safer. “81 per cent of all respondents “strongly favor” passing of the proposed Road Safety Bill and 90 per cent believe that passing the Bill will be an important accomplishment for the Indian Parliament,” said the survey report which was released by Former Union Home Secretary GK Pillai in the presence of several families affected by road accidents, reports PTI. In the past decade, more than 12 lakh people have been killed in road crashes in India. This translates to over 380 deaths a day, equivalent to a jumbo jet crash. Survey findings also revealed that 3 out of 5 respondents feel unsafe while traveling on Indian roads as drivers, pedestrians or passengers, the ...

Here labour pain is not an emergency Mumbai: A woman in labour is not an emergency, believes the state government. This view was aired before the Bombay High Court while a division bench was hearing a PIL filed in 2009. Aariya Khan, a 20-year-old destitute woman who sells trinkets on the western line, delivered a baby on the Bhayandar railway platform in January 2009. After the delivery, a constable present on the platform took her to the BMC-run Bhagwati Hospital in Borivali West. Aariya had delivered an underweight baby and was discharged from Bhagwati Hospital within a week, as a result of which, it is claimed, her baby died. She has earlier lost two children. The petition points out that no hospital or clinic is available near railway stations to deal with emergencies and that no ad hoc step was taken while the lady was in labour. But Niranjan Pandit, Additional Government Pleader for the state government, had a different take on the issue. “A woman in labour is not an emerge...

Unforgettable S.Sadanand Dr. M. V. Kamath The Telephone kept ringing. I knew Swaminath Sadanand, my boss at the Free Press group of newspapers, was calling me. But I didn’t want to speak to him. That morning, Sadanand had chewed me out over some trivial matter and although he’d often done it before, this time something in me had snapped. Leaving his room in a daze, I had typed out a resignation letter and fled from the office, vowing never to return. “Go on, answer it,” my sister-in-law urged me. I picked up the receiver. It was, as I’d guessed Sadanand, though his normally grating voice now was choked and tearful. Why was I so upset? He asked. Wasn’t I like a second son to him? Couldn’t fathers scold their sons? He was sending his son to fetch me. How could I resist? I returned to the office and was enveloped in a bear hug that unnerved me as much as the morning explosion. But that was Sadanand for you. He raged and loved, he laughed and he cried, with all the abandon and innoc...